Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 10

51. “War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.”

— Anthony Doerr

52. “You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

— Anthony Doerr

53. “Marie-Laure hears Madame Manec: You must never stop believing.”

— Anthony Doerr

54. “Von Rumpel laughs. He appreciates that they are trying to play the game. But don’t they understand that the winner has already been determined? He.”

— Anthony Doerr

55. “The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

— Anthony Doerr

56. “The war that killed your grandfather killed sixteen million others. One and a half million French boys alone, most of them younger than I was. Two million on the German side. March the dead in a single-file line, and for eleven days and eleven nights, they’d walk past our door.”

— Anthony Doerr

57. “To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”

— Anthony Doerr

58. “What ways? Whom have you put your trust in?” “You have to trust someone sometime.” “If your same blood doesn’t run in the arms and legs of the person you’re next to, you can’t trust anything. And even then. It’s not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it’s a system. How do you fight a system?” “You try.”

— Anthony Doerr

59. “Jutta opens her eyes but doesn’t look at him. ‘Don’t tell lies. Lie to yourself, Werner, but don’t lie to me.”

— Anthony Doerr

60. “Marie-Laure drops her cane; she begins to cry. Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest. “it’s so big,” she whispers. “You can do this, Marie.” She cannot.”

— Anthony Doerr

61. “Frederick said we don’t have choices, don’t own our lives, but in the end it was Werner who pretended there were no choices, Werner who watched Frederick dump the pail of water at his feet – I will not – Werner who stood by as the consequences came raining down. Werner who watched Volkheimer wade into house after house, the same ravening nightmare recurring over and over and over.”

— Anthony Doerr

62. “Gravity and time. Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.”

— Anthony Doerr

63. “I am only alive because I have not yet died.”

— Anthony Doerr

64. “You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest.”

— Anthony Doerr

65. “They’ll say you’re too little, Werner, that you’re from nowhere, that you shouldn’t dream big. But I believe in you. I think you’ll do something great.”

— Anthony Doerr

66. “But minds are not to be trusted. Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.”

— Anthony Doerr

67. “What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.”

— Anthony Doerr

68. “Somewhere, someone is figuring out how to push back the hood of grief, but Marie-Laure cannot. Not yet. The truth is that she is a disabled girl with no home and no parents.”

— Anthony Doerr

69. “Live faithfully, fight bravely, and die laughing.”

— Anthony Doerr

70. “Her father says to tamp down her imagination. Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck. Some things are simply more rare than others, and that’s why there are locks. “But, Papa, do you believe it’s real?” “The diamond or the curse?” “Both. Either.” “They’re just stories, Marie.”

— Anthony Doerr

71. “Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters.”

— Anthony Doerr

72. “He thinks of the old broken miners he’d see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.”

— Anthony Doerr

73. “Lord Our God Your Grace is a purifying fire.”

— Anthony Doerr

74. “Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?” He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”

— Anthony Doerr

75. “A dozen pigeons roosting on the cathedral spire cataract down its length and wheel out over the sea.”

— Anthony Doerr

76. “So really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”

— Anthony Doerr

77. “But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?” He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”

— Anthony Doerr

78. “Marie-Laure is glad to hear a smile enter his voice. But beneath it she can sense his thoughts fluttering like trapped birds.”

— Anthony Doerr

79. “There are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together.”

— Anthony Doerr

80. “He says, “You are very brave.” She lowers the bucket. “What is your name?” He tells her. She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?” He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.”

— Anthony Doerr

81. “Nature demands symmetry.”

— Anthony Doerr

82. “Because of the diamond in your coat pocket. Because I left it here to protect you. All it has done is put me in more danger. Then why hasn’t the house been hit? Why hasn’t it caught fire? It’s a rock, Papa. A pebble. There is only luck, bad or good. Chance and physics. Remember? You are alive. I am only alive because I have not yet died.”

— Anthony Doerr

83. “A corner of the night sky, beyond a wall of trees, blooms red. In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth, racing in all directions, and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he’s looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water, and the sky has become the sea, and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey in the dark.”

— Anthony Doerr

84. “All day Marie-Laure lies on her stomach and reads. Logic, reason, pure science: these, Aronnax insists, are the proper ways to pursue a mystery. Not fables and fairy tales.”

— Anthony Doerr

85. “Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children’s House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutlery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the mines.”

— Anthony Doerr

86. “A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.”

— Anthony Doerr

87. “You will eat country and breathe nation.”

— Anthony Doerr

88. “Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.”

— Anthony Doerr

89. “He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back. Through the panel he calls, “I am not killing you. I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.” He pauses, fumbling to translate. “The song, light of the moon?” She almost smiles.”

— Anthony Doerr

90. “Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience – buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello – become new all over again.”

— Anthony Doerr

91. “Every part of him wants to scream: is this not wrong? But here it is right.”

— Anthony Doerr

92. “Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.”

— Anthony Doerr

93. “A scientist’s work is determined by two things: his interests and those of his time. Everything has led to this.”

— Anthony Doerr

94. “What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair.”

— Anthony Doerr

95. “There is only chance in this world, chance and physics.”

— Anthony Doerr

96. “He looks across to the fires. He thinks: The universe is full of fuel.”

— Anthony Doerr

97. “Still,” he says, “certain things compel people. Pearls, for example, and sinistral shells, shells with a left-handed opening. Even the best scientists feel the urge now and then to put something in a pocket. That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”

— Anthony Doerr

98. “Those last nights in Paris, walking home with her father at midnight, the huge book clasped against her chest, Marie-Laure thinks she can sense a shiver beneath the air, in the pauses between the chirring of the insects, like the spider cracks of ice when too much weight is set upon it. As if all this time the city has been no more than a scale model built by her father and the shadow of a great hand has fallen over it.”

— Anthony Doerr

99. “To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.”

— Anthony Doerr

100. “Is she happy? For portions of every day, she is happy.”

— Anthony Doerr